SHORT STORY: The Lamplighter

A very short story inspired by a piece of artwork I saw earlier today. Beware the Lamplighter...

The Lamplighter
By Patch Middleton

Creeping through black streets, fingers bent all four joints, the Lamplighter makes her way. Her cloven feet tap between the cobbles like an old woman chewing with wooden teeth. She reaches the corner, raises one of her many thin arms and ignites the paper. Blue flames flicker, then green, then yellow, reaching up in their glass prisons. This lamp is lit.

But the clock ticks further. She must press on. Half the town is left to do, and the evenings here are not that long. Her skirts skitter through puddles and dust, greying from years of toil without a wash. She holds her lantern out in front with her longest arm. It swings gently, casting shadows up the walls of houses. Fearful eyes peek from around curtains, watching her steady journey.

She reaches the next lamp. Then, a sound. Not the clatter of a cartwheel, or the squeak of a rat, but a human sound. A grunt, a groan, a wail. Her many eyes, like empty honey comb, whip round. A boy. So plump and scared. He’d only come outside to fetch in logs for his winter fire. Foolish boy. Plump boy.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he fumbles for words from his vacuous mind, “For disturbing you.”

The Lamplighter cocks her head. She does not understand human words. She hates the plump little boy and the way he stares. She’ll take his eyes so he cannot stare anymore.

Her arm reaches out to grab the boy, a taloned finger poking into the soft socket. He tries to scream, but another hand stops his tongue. She pulls him close and smells him. Beef, onions, burning firewood. Plump boy is better off a crumpled heap in the street, she decided.

But the clock ticks further still. She had been distracted enough. There were other lamps to light. She lifts the lantern and on she creeps through the black streets coated in soot and ash.

She does her duty, just like everyone else in this town, and she does it well. But she hates interruptions. And she hates noise more so. So stay inside once the sun has set, for the Lamplighter cannot be far away. If you see a dull light, late one evening, wandering through the fog, that’s her. And once you have seen the light, it could already be too late.

The Wonderful World of 'It's Just Not Good Enough'.

It's just not good enough. Those five awful words that writers, and most creatives as a whole, experience almost every single day. And if you have the joy of not experiencing this feeling for one day, then you are sure to have it ten-fold the next.

With everything we write, whether we are happy with it to begin with, then find flaws, or hate it as soon as the fingers hit the keys or the pen unleashes its ink onto paper, we are bound to reach that moment of 'It's Just Not Good Enough'. It's a horrible way to live and work and is one of the many reasons being a writer is so damn difficult. But the thing is, I know that 99% of all writers experience it, from Mark Lawrence, to Nicholas Sparks, from Neil Gaiman to Robin Hobb. Everyone is in the same boat, and if you're not, maybe that's the where the problem lies.

It doesn't have to be an entirely negative experience. I am currently working on the second book, 'The Shadows Stare Back', of my Shieldlaw Trilogy, and am in the throws of 'just not good enough'. But then I think back to writing the first book, and how I reached a similar stage then, but slogged through and made my work better. Without that nagging feeling, you might not be bothered to redraft, or work harder to make your work the best it can be. Embrace the 'it's just not good enough', and use that as fuel to make it good enough. Or somewhere close to good enough. Or just better than it is now.

You may be reading this and thinking, why do I care what this guy has to say on the matter? And I would be like, fair enough. But, to be honest this, is almost more of a post for myself than anyone else, though if anyone does get something out of this, it would make my week. Keep working hard. Never give up. All those usual clichés are true.

Find joy in writing, otherwise what's the point.

The Female Gender In Fantasy

Okay, so I guess that title got your attention. And as a man writing about feminism, I am trying my best to be careful and not make any assumptions or anything like that. So, here we go.

To begin, when you think of women in fantasy, what images spring to mind? To many of you, I presume, this will be very close to that image in your head:

Women in fantasy. What a buzz word topic for this day and age. So much progress has been made over the past few years, and yet still here we are, coming back to the same old issues again and again. Why? Because the problem hasn't been solved yet.

Now, some of you will point to various examples of novels that break the trend and have well-rounded, complex female characters and, dare I even say it, a strong female protagonist, and say "Look at all the progress we're making, well done us." But that is exactly the problem: until these examples are no longer heralded as special, then the issue still stands.

This may sound like a backwards step or a bizarre thing to say, but bear with me. The basic point that I am trying to put across is this: I wish that posts like this one didn't need to exist. It should not be special that a new fantasy book/film/comic has strong and plentiful female characters. It should be normal. This is 2016! Why is it special that the new Star Wars and Mad Max films (which, by the way, are both amazing) have strong female protagonists? It is, in today's society, but in an ideal world, it shouldn't be.

This issue affects many genres across the board, but fantasy more than most. This has never made sense to me, because fantasy of all genres, should be able to work this issue the most. Fantasy is just that: fantastical. If we can read books that present worlds with magical all-powerful rings, dragons that become statues then become dragons again, flying ships, talking ships, walking cities etc. etc. etc., is it really too far-fetched to have strong female characters? You can write ANYTHING and yet we are still stuck to pre-existing real world rules like 'men are strong, women are not' and 'men can fight, women can't'.

And this leads on to a misunderstanding that people seem to have around this topic. When I say 'strong' female characters, I don't mean 'strong' in the physical sense, although from time to time that can be important too. In a fantasy world where you decide the rules, why can't women be members of the Town Guard, or the elite fighting squad of the Grand Empress, or the all powerful, complicated villain that serves as the primary antagonist of your story? There are no rules to say they can't, other than the ones you write for yourselves. As long as it fits with the world you have set up, then then the audience will be willing to accept it. The problem comes with the 'Trinity Syndrome', named after the so-called badass woman in 'The Matrix', who ends up serving no purpose to the plot beyond being a 'strong female character'. (see more on this fascinating article from The Dissolve: https://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/ )

Instead, when I say 'strong' I mean complex, interesting, well-rounded characters that feel like real people and not stereotypes. Examples of these I would give are: Arya and Catelyn Stark, and Cersei Lannister in 'A Song of Ice and Fire', Patience and Kettricken in 'The Farseer Trilogy', are to name a few from some of my favourite books. These are not all physically strong characters (although some are at times), but have interesting character arcs, are written as people who have real issues, problems and feelings and also serve a purpose to the plot.

Another problem can be encountered by going too far the other way, writing a female character that denies everything that it is to be female to avoid causing offence. In my opinion, making a good female character should not always be to make them basically male apart from what they have beneath their britches. This then leads to the prickly path of thorns of writing women as you think they are, deciding what their 'feminine touchstones' should be. As a not-woman myself, I have nowhere near enough knowledge of what it means to be a woman, which is where difficulties can arise. But who says we male authors can't actually go out and speak to a member of that other sex and find out what they think of what you are writing. We spend so much time researching how economies work, how weapons work and all that to make a realistic world, why can't we research this? I'm not saying it's the only way, or even the best way, but surely it is a way.

In my own writing, I try to fill the world of Aethtea with interesting, dynamic and varied female characters  both as principle characters and side characters in the world itself. There's no use having a female protagonist if everyone around them is male, even the no-named characters in the background. I have tried my best to have equal female and male protagonists in 'The Shadows Dance' and the subsequent books in 'The Shieldlaw Trilogy'. This is not because I'm trying to take some political point, but because that's the way a lot of the real world is (or at least should be) and how I want my world to be. There is a time and a place for taking these feminist stances. They are very important to moving our society forward. But wouldn't it be great if these things were seen as the way things were. Just normal. Oh, this book has three female protagonists, I don't notice anything strange about this. Because it's not strange, or at least it shouldn't be.

If I said that I was reading a fantasy novel where 90% of the characters were female, eyebrows would be raised, monocles would be dropped into glasses of brandy. However, on the other side of this crazy gender coin, if I said I was reading Lord of the Rings, one of the tent poles of fantasy literature, no one bats an eyelid. Yet, if we look at the Wikipedia page (I know, my sources are incredible) you can see that of the 20 protagonists, 3 are female: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings#Main_characters. And of the villains, there is only one female character, and that's a huge flipping spider!

I'm no way near saying I'm perfect, not even close, but I'm trying and will continue to try, with a hope that I can one day look back and see I've done something positive towards this cause.

So next time you are coming up with a character, whether it be protagonist, side character or background character, just think. Is there any reason for them to be male, other than your own immediate assumption influenced by today's still twisted society? It is not an easy issue to tackle by any stretch of the imagination, but let's try our damnedest to tackle it. Let's start making a new normal in fantasy.

2016, An Update On Me

Here we have it. 2015 is over and we move ever onwards and upwards into the terrifying new territory of 2016. Thank you for all of those who have come with me on this journey over the past six months, from amateur writer to an actual published author!

So where to go from here? What am I up to next?

Well, after the release of 'The Shadows Dance' (thank you to all who bought it so far), I am already working on the next book, entitled 'The Shadows Stare Back'. I am roughly half way through, and things are getting very exciting. I am enjoying writing this one more than I did the last, because I know how the characters work and where the plot is going, which means I can have a lot of fun with it. This is slated for release early 2017, so there is a year to go yet.

In the mean time, I will continue to update this blog, as regularly as I can do. I will also work on a few short stories in the world of Aethtea to post up here, as I have ideas for many to do.

Anyway, yeah, hope 2016 is a good year for you all. Let's grab it by the balls and do this.